6/10/2010

CPSC Micro-fiction #9

CPSC Notices 6/3-10/10

Maytag Recalls Dishwashers Due to Fire Hazard - An electrical failure in the dishwasher’s heating element can pose a serious fire hazard. Maytag has received 12 reports of dishwasher heating element failures that resulted in fires and dishwasher damage, including one report of extensive kitchen damage from a fire. No injuries have been reported.

GE Recalls Front Load Washers Due to Fire and Shock Hazards - A wire can break in the machine and make contact with a metal part on the washtub while the machine is operating, posing fire and shock hazards to consumers. GE is aware of seven incidents in which flames escaped the units and caused minor smoke damage. No injuries have been reported.

Micro-fiction 6/10/10

They sit, outwardly motionless, oscillating within themselves, the stoic face of contained kinetic energy, the holy halves of power and silence. One for processing clothes, the other for dishware. These gods sanitize. They take that which our bodies have soiled, and they make them whole again. Machinery of redemption, their spark of heaven's alternating current heats the water, and with it, our bodily sins are wiped away.But for too long have these gods been ignored. In haste we order them to our purposes, pulling them from the firmament and into our dusty, earthen homes. We deposit our discarded waste into them with mere purpose, the profanity of routine, with the haste of exuberant humans with better things to do that to pay homage to the forces of nature that allow us freedom of the will we claim.And so it starts with a spark. The smallest copper wire, the capillary beds of powder-coated steel deities, bursting in electric stigmata, insulation opened in the mercy of heaven, and the current finds a ground. Then the smoke, the odoriferous fumes of combustion, the smell of the sacrifice that ought to have been. And still motionless, the gods reach out and touch our homes, passing flame through invisible finger tips, self-immolation their passage back to the sky. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As the gods' will, justice is done.

"..."

"For centuries the situation in literature was such that a small number of writers faced many thousands of times that number of readers. Then, towards the end of the last century, there came a change. As the press grew in volume, making ever-increasing numbers of new political, religious, scientific, professional and local organs available to its readership, larger and larger sections of that readership (gradually at first) turned into writers. It began with the daily newspapers opening their 'correspondence columns' to such people, and it has now reached a point where few Europeans involved in the labour process could fail, basically, to find some opportunity or other to publish an experience at work, a complaint, a piece of reporting or something similar. The distinction between writer and readership is thus in the process of losing its fundamental character. That distinction is becoming a functional one, assuming a different form from one case to to the next. "

--Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction